More fingers!

Okay I am here once again with hopefully the final prototype after creating a finger with a better range of motion.

I tested out the finger attachment with the elastic to stop it from falling off when moving it with your hand positioned down, and I found that after awhile the elastic began to pull the finger too far past the finger stop, so on the first large part I added a little notch for my fingertip to fit in.

Now I am going to make things nicer with some filleting edges. Ah, that looks nice except- aak! wtf is this?

Well, It seems like if I just do it one chunk at a time it is okay.

A very annoying thing about selecting edges to fillet in rhino is that when you trim, if you select the wrong one when selecting multiple, you can just hit undo. However, it doesn't work like that with filleting.

I managed to get everything neatened up and added some little loops on the ring part for elastics. I printed the test with the intent that if it finished at 10pm and worked I could print it in good quality overnight while scaling it down to what I assumed would fit my pinky and printing a test of that as well. 

However, though most printed okay, the ring did not print the holes, and the middle section just crumbled apart. Erica the tech said it was probably due to open edges. I fixed the ring, but then realized that since I also needed to make the finger notch a little longer, that was a bunch of work that my brain does not want to do right now, so I will do that tomorrow, and finish glazing some ceramics tonight.  I am pretty confident that I am almost there though!

The next day I went back after remaking a few of the bits and it works perfectly! (besides the classic falling off the fingers thing that elastics will fix)

I decided to test out making the other fingers by scaling them down based on width. I did the pinky first because that was the biggest variable, besides the thumb. It fit great, so I rescaled the print for my middle and index fingers- they appeared to be the same width when I measured them. All that was good!

I have super fat thumbs so when I scaled it for my thumb it was giant! However, after scaling it up for width I then removed parts of each section with boolean differencing out middle bits to scale it down for length. The thumb test print took longer than any of my other prints even when using draft- over 7 hours. It was still massive! I didn't even bother putting it together.

At the same time I went and printed some good versions of the fingers that I had made successfully  with my nice filament. They looked sweet but one thing I noticed was that printing the thin tall bits that I used to join together my finger bits which never had a problem printing draft quality with the schools filament were failing after the first few layers. I then took them out of subsequent quality prints. I tried printing them with my filament at draft quality and they mostly worked, so I continued to print the rest of mine like that, separately and at draft quality. I wonder why it does that?

Anyways, the thumb was a failure so I tried remaking it again, only removing the fingertip and turning the end of the second join into a fingertip and remaking the first part your finger goes into. Some parts of it touched, plus the connectors and the rod that pushed the finger parts were too small, so I remade it again. This time it had better motion, but it did not bend much, plus it was too thin horizontally so the push bar pushed up against my thumb and I had difficulties bending it. I can see how I could rebuild parts of it and try again, and I'm certain that in 3-5 more prototypes I could achieve a working thumb, but considering how long it takes to both build and print I do not have time this semester. Maybe with another month. Although I am much quicker at remaking these parts, it is almost like modeling a whole new item because I will have to break down and change parts.

I noticed that when I tried tying a finger to a bracelet that I had that it wobbled around a bit. Therefore I did what I noticed a lot of other 3d printed finger people did- I printed a little plate for in the back of my wrist with holes for the strings. I also booleaned slots for velcro to slide into.  This seems to work good! Yayyyy!!

Now I can wave my unreasonably large fingers at everyone with reckless abandon!